The Citizenship & Sustainability 2020 program, announced earlier this year by Johnson & Johnson (J&J), radically expands the scope of their commitment to sustainability, as well as the expanding role their sustainable procurement program plays in creating value. In a recent webcast we heard from John Ruebush, Director of Sustainable Procurement at J&J, in a session entitled “Driving Supplier Performance in CSR to Reduce Risk and Boost Innovation.”
Ruebush describes some of the key challenges J&J faces, which are similar to those in many organizations: to continue creating greater transparency in their complex global supply chain, and to meet increasing regulatory requirements for disclosure. As suppliers mature and encounter a new level of challenges, the environmental, human rights, and ethical risks are also evolving thus requiring programs that span traditionally silo’ed compliance areas.
J&J is building off the success of their Healthy Futures 2015 program and moving forward to embrace their aspiration of a world-class supplier sustainability program by 2020 with their Citizenship and Sustainability pillars: People, Places, and Practices. Sustainable procurement is a key lever for the “Practices” pillar.
To get there, they are seeking to have suppliers fully understand the importance, and take ownership of growing their own sustainability programs.
“Great presentation and important work being done by both J&J and EcoVadis”– Senior Product Director from Dun & Bradstreet
Best practices are revealed as they discuss their approach to aligning teams with a common set of goals, tools and scorecards, how they are involving category manager and rallying suppliers around their 2020 objectives. They have set an ambitious goal to enroll suppliers covering 80% of their spend in their Sustainable Procurement Program by 2020.
To achieve this target, J&J is already working with the Carbon Disclosure Project and EcoVadis. “All suppliers enrolled must complete the EcoVadis assessment to demonstrate conformance to the J&J Responsibility Standards.” says Ruebush. “This is the starting point for collaborating with our suppliers to accelerate environmental and social improvements across the value chain“.
For suppliers to take a stand for sustainability, they need to establish and publicly report two or more sustainability goals in one of a the key environmental and social criteria, and track their progress.
Chart 1: J&J’s Scoring Scale aligned to EcoVadis’
“This webinar provided very clear steps to help a company benchmark the topics they need to cover as part of their own sustainable procurement program.”– Sustainable Procurement Director from Coty
Several participants in the webinar have started to evaluate CSR risks in their supply chain and are planning to do more in 2017. It is quite encouraging to see that a couple of them already have a structured program in place for monitoring suppliers’ CSR risks.
Watch the webinar to learn more details, including how they set interim targets for 2016, how they prioritize existing suppliers vs. RFPs and new programs, and leverage training and empowerment of Supplier Relationship Managers and Category Managers to set targets and embrace their program.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE WEBINAR
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